With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed
O'er him who formed the Tuscan's siren tongue?[1]
That music in itself, whose sounds are song,
The poetry of speech? No;—even his tomb
Uptorn, must bear the hyæna bigot's wrong,
No more amidst the meaner dead find room,
Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom!
LIX.
And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust;
Yet for this want more noted, as of yore
The Cæsar's pageant,[2] shorn of Brutus' bust,
Did but of Rome's best Son remind her more:
- ↑ [Compare Beppo, stanza xliv.—
"I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet South."Compare, too, the first sentence of a letter which Byron wrote "on a blank leaf of the volume of 'Corinne,'" which Teresa [Guiccioli] left in forgetfulness in a garden in Bologna: "Amor Mio,—How sweet is this word in your Italian language!" (Life of Lord Byron, by Emilio Castelar, p. 145).]
- ↑ [By "Cæsar's pageant" Byron means the pageant decreed by Tiberius Cæsar. Compare Don Juan, Canto XV. stanza xlix.—
"And this omission, like that of the bust
Of Brutus at the pageant of Tiberius."At the public funeral of Junia, wife of Cassius and sister of
objects of Christian Faith, to the names and drapery of Greek and Roman mythology."—(Unpublished MS. note of S. T. Coleridge, written in his copy of Boccaccio's Opere, 4 vols. 1723.) They had their revenge on Boccaccio, and Byron has had his revenge on them.]
